Shelving the Body, People Shelved with Their Objects by Darragh Casey

In April 2012, artist, furniture design student and photographer Darragh Casey traveled to Cork, Ireland to “shelf” and photograph 3 generations of his family. In his Shelving the Body project, he created a series of shelves to hold his kin in unique ways. The resulting Shelf Portraits displayed them “alongside objects relevant to their own lives and personalities.” Check out the behind-the-scenes time-lapse video from that shoot.

“Shelving the Body” aims to disrupt our habitual relationships with furniture and reassess the idea of the ‘user’. This subversion, initiated through a series of experimentation and trials, approaches the typology of the shelf with a physical consideration for the figure. At times, the outcomes often reduce the role of the figure to that of a ‘shelved object’, exploring the idea of mutual dependency, challenging its user, or simply taking inspiration from the figure’s presence.

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